Lucia Dlugoszewski (1925 – 2000)
Lucia Dlugoszewski was born in Detroit of Polish immigrants. She began studying piano at the age of 6 but decided instead to pursue studies in physics and pre-med. Around 1950 she gave all that up and moved to New York City, where she studied piano and composition. She began creating her own instruments, including a “timbre piano” where the strings are struck with various objects.
Lucia Dlugoszewski became very involved in the New York City arts scene. She married dancer and choreographer Erick Hawkins (1909 – 1994) and composed music for his dance pieces. After his death, she ran the Erick Hawkins Dance Company and choreographed some dance works herself. Her obituary in the New York Times reported:
“Ms. Dlugoszewski was celebrated in New York dance for her unparalleled gift for inspiring intense affection, admiration and exasperation all at once as she exuberantly buttonholed countless company directors, choreographers, dancers and writers to involve them in her own and Hawkins’s projects. Beneath that hectic, usually disheveled exterior, however, was a poetic, gutsy composer known for her experimentation with timbre or tonal quality and color, her invention of percussion instruments and the freshness of her musical structures, in works made for the timbre piano and traditional orchestra instruments. She created, Virgil Thomson once said, “far-out music of great delicacy, originality and beauty of sound”.
Partially as a result of her unique instrumentation, Lucia Dlugoszewski’s music seems not to be often performed live these days. This video is a dance entitled Fountain in the Middle of the Room performed by Katherine Duke to choreography and music by Lucia Dlugoszewski. It uses a recording of her composition Exacerbated Subtlety Concert (Why Does a Woman Love a Man?) Parts I and II:
Although this video is not optimum and you can hear street noises from outside, this is a rare live performance of one of Lucia Dlugoszewski’s compositions, Tender Theater Flight Nageire from 1978: